The Influence Mechanism of Power on Prosocial Behavior : The Mediating Role of Two Types of Sense of Power and the Moderating Role of Construal Level

• DOI: 10.56028/aehssr.13.1.486.2025
• Publication Date: 2025-04-07T05:58:12Z
• Authors: Bowen Zhang; Yuhui Shao; Jie Zhou

Power is an important social phenomenon and a crucial component of the social structure. Power itself is abstract, and various external situations and objective constructs related to power can only influence behaviors through the variables of psychological states. This study explored the influence mechanism between power and prosocial behavior through questionnaires and experiments. It put forward two hypotheses about power perceptions (sense of responsibility and sense of control), and verified the relationship between the two types of power perceptions in the link between power and prosocial behavior through experiments. The results showed that the sense of power responsibility positively influenced prosocial behavior, while the sense of power control negatively influenced it. Moreover, the sense of responsibility played a significant mediating role in the "power-prosocial behavior" relationship. In addition, based on the construal level theory, this study verified through experiments the moderating effect of construal level on power perception, that is, increasing the construal level could effectively and positively moderate the sense of power responsibility, thus prompting those in power to engage in more prosocial behaviors.